20 Local SEO Tools to Improve your Rankings

Did you know that 50% of consumers who do a local search on their phone will visit a store within the very same day?

That’s a lot of potential revenue.

So it goes without saying really that a strong local SEO strategy is key to making sure these people visit your business, and don’t instead go elsewhere.

As competition increases, the task of increasing visibility in the local search results takes centre stage. If you run a small business, you need to be leveraging local SEO. You need to tracking, measuring and analyzing your local marketing efforts, not to mention staying on top of your competitors.

If only there were some tools to help streamline all of this…

Enter: local SEO tools.

20 Best Local SEO Tools

Local SEO tools are designed to make your marketing work more efficient.

The only problem is there are loads of tools available and even more information out there about them. I mean, just Google it and you’ll see 69,100,000 results!

That’s a lot of choices.

In fact, that’s probably too many choices. So to help you filter out the noise, here are 20 top local SEO tools (some you will recognize & some you may not) as well as alternatives too.

Ready?

Let’s go:

#1 Whitespark Local Citation Finder

Whitespark is a local listing management tool that does a lot: it can collect customer feedback and reviews, monitor rankings by location, and find new link opportunities.

One very useful part of this tool suite is the Whitespark Citation Finder tool. Unsurprisingly, this tool finds citation opportunities for your business as well as analysing your competition and citation growth.

In layman’s terms, it finds places where you can create (trustworthy) business listings to improve local SEO rankings.

Bonus Tools: Review Handout Generator + Review Link Generator

We all know that getting reviews on your Google My Business profile is vital for local SEO.

But how can you make the process of actually getting these reviews easier

With the review handout and link generator.

These tools quickly generate a review handout and shareable link that allows customers to review a business with one just one click. You can share it via email, on social media, and anywhere else to help make the reviewing process as simple as possible.

#2 Moz Local

Moz Local is another local listing management tool that lets users manage local listings, as well as claim and verify submissions.

If you want to streamline the process of setting up local profiles (and get them verified), the tool aims to make your business more visible by working with data aggregators to push listings and improve your local SEO.

Moz Local, works to improve your NAP accuracy by scanning your citations and notifying you of any errors or inconsistencies. It also pings you if any of your citations have errors and need updating.

#3 BrightLocal

BrightLocal is another suite of local marketing tools, allowing you to monitor, audit and optimize your local SEO from a single platform. These tools include; citation & GMB audits, rank tracking, citation cleanup and white label SEO reporting.

More specifically, this collection of local SEO tools lets you:

• compare your local search performance vs your competitors
• find where your competitors have citations
• stay up to date of new reviews,
• submit your business information to aggregators
• claim, update, and submit to business listings.

Bonus Tool: BrightLocal Search Results Checker

This free tool lets you see what different search results look like from a different locations by entering a city or zip code. Whilst not as accurate or as precise as the geolocation on smartphones, it is enough to give you a good general idea.

#4 Synup

Synup allows you to easily and effectively manage your local listings, review them as well as analyze your NAP and listing data.

This local marketing tool allows you to:

• automatically crawl, submit, and sync up your listings across trusted local directories
• check listings for existing citations on them
• add your NAP to listings (and fix incorrect data on existing ones).
• send you notifications when your business/brand gets a new review or mention,
• use local analytics to monitor how locations are performing

#5 Yext

Yext offers review monitoring, analytics and local listing management. Like other listing management tools, it syncs your business data across hundreds of listings, helps collect reviews (and monitor them) as well getting analytics for your pages.

However, what makes Yext different is automated local listing management, allowing you to get your listing data populated instantly and update your NAP data in real time.

#6 Screaming Frog

Whilst not an out-and-out local SEO tool, Screaming Frog can be like a swiss army knife for your sites SEO.

This tool can help audit your website’s HTML and Meta Data, find any broken links (to avoid hurting your rankings) and many more advanced features. And if you’ve got a small site (under 500 pages) it is free to use.

Alternative Tool: Beam Us Up

A good alternative to Screaming Frog is the free SEO crawler Beam Us Up. It allows you to find and fix potential SEO problems like duplicate content and missing metadata. The only downside is that it is only available for Windows.

#7 Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a powerhouse of an SEO tool.

When it comes to your local SEO strategy, Ahrefs lets you spy on your competition to reverse-engineer their backlink profile, go after their organic rankings, uncover new content ideas along with many more features.

Alternative Tool: Serpstat & SEO Review Tools

If Ahrefs is a little out of your price range, Serpstat may be a more cost effective solution.

Serpstat is a general purpose SEO tool that can perform backlink analysis, competitor research, keyword research as well as track rankings.

If you want a completely free tool, the backlinks checker by SEO Review Tools is for you. This free SEO tool actually uses Ahrefs data to check the backlinks of a URL which is helpful for a quick overview.

#8 BuzzStream

Want to get local backlinks? BuzzStream is the tool for you.

This content promotion tool helps you to find and build relationships with local influencers, which in turn help to drive word-of-mouth traffic and boost local brand awareness.

#9 Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Sheets etc

Did you know Google makes some of the best free SEO tools out there?

Think about it, they provide loads of useful (and free) tools to help improve your website and marketing, including:

• Keyword Planner for keyword research
• Google Trends to help visualise and discover data trends
• Search Console to help fix any technical and on‐page issues
• Analytics to analyse your website stats
• Google Sheets to collect and process all kinds of SEO data using Sheets templates
• Pagespeed Insights to check your site speed.

If you’re new to local SEO, or just looking for some new tools, you should start with these before looking for any others. There are lots more tools too like Tag Manager, Data Studio and not to mention Google My Business; an absolute essential for dominating your local marketing.

Whilst we are on the subject of GMB, check out this:

Bonus Tool: Blumenthals Category Search

This is a super simple tool which helps you find the right GMB category to use. Just type in your service and it will find suggestions for what category to list your business under.

#10 Yoast SEO Plugin

Is your site built on WordPress?

Then your site needs an SEO plugin like Yoast.

This WordPress plugin allows you to optimize meta tags and content, create XML sitemaps, use schema.org markup and much more to help with your local SEO visibility.

Alternative Tools: All in One SEO Pack & RankMath

Although Yoast does a good job of optimising your site for local SEO, there are alternatives like the All in One SEO plugin and Rank Math, which offer many of the same features.

#11 ReviewTrackers

ReviewTrackers does exactly what it says on the tin: it tracks customer reviews for your business.

Customer reviews should play a big role in your local SEO strategy. After all, 97% of consumers say reviews influence their buying decision.

ReviewTrackers monitors online reviews and feedback from over 70 review sites to measure your brand’s reputation and how customers are reacting to your business. It can also send notifications when new reviews go up online so you can stay on top of them.

#12 CopyScape

Duplicate content can hurt your site. Both in terms of how customers perceive it and with Google rankings. So use a tool like CopyScape to check for duplicate content.

Run your website content through CopyScape to make sure it is original and to avoid any plagiarism (both from your own site or from another sources).

Alternative Tools: Siteliner & Plagiarism Checker

Sometimes it’s good to get a second opinion on duplicate content, so you can try running your pages through Siteliner and Small SEO Tool’s Plagiarism Checker.

#13 GTmetrix

GTmetrix analyses your sites speed and gives suggestions on how to improve it. The load time of your website is an important ranking factor. No one wants to wait for a slow site to load.

Page load speed of your site will have a big impact on your local SEO rankings: the slower it is the less likely visitors will stay on your site, resulting in a higher bounce rate..

Alternative Tool: PageSpeed Insights

Another free tool provided by Google. PageSpeed Insights not only reviews the load times of your site, but also makes improvement suggestions.

#14 Schema Markup Generator

An easy way to add Schema structured markup to a page is to use JSON-LD. An even easier way is to use Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator to quickly generate the correct JSON-LD file to add.

This generator can be used to create local business structured data markup to put into the head or footer of your site in order to improve search engine visibility.

It’s pretty simple to set up, just select the type of Schema markup you want to generate (probably local business) and fill in the details. Once complete, you can copy and paste the generated Schema markup onto your website.

Just run it through the Structured Data Testing Tool (another free tool from Google) to make sure there are no errors and that your structured data markup is set up properly.

#15 Answer the Public

Apart from being infamous for that slightly creepy bearded guy on the homepage, Answer the Public is super useful for finding questions people are asking in Google.

It grabs Google autocomplete queries in bulk and then sorts them into various lists for free. You can then take these popular questions and create content that your potential customers want to read.

Alternative Tools: LSIGraph

LSI Graph finds semantically related keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) for any topic by scraping the top search results for a target keyword to find the most common words.

It is useful for getting a sense of what topics (and subtopics) are important to mention in your local content.

#16 Places Scout

Places Scout it’s an all-in-one competitive local intelligence solution. It that provides tools for keyword research, lead generation, rank tracking and business reputation monitoring for Local SEO.

It can also provide a mix of multiple data sources (Links, Google My Business, Citation, Social) so you can see what factors are really separating your site (or your client’s site) from the competition.

#17 GeoRanker

GeoRanker is a collection of local SEO tracking and analytics tools to help you find local citations and track your rankings.

Specifically, GeoRanker can help you grow your business by:

• Creating business citations on websites in your industry.
• Checking website rankings and showing real time positions
• Measuring the number of times a keyword appears vs the total number of words on a web page (aka keyword density)

#18 Free Review Monitoring

It should come as no surprise that Free Review Monitoring monitors your reviews… for free.

This service monitors your reviews on all the major review sites on a daily basis and sends you an email everyday with new reviews as they are crawled. You can even set up the tool to monitor your competitors’ reviews. Nice.

#19 Notify.ly

Notify is a free mention notification tool that tells you know when your business/brand gets mentioned on social media. Notification sources include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, blogs, and more.

Not only can you get notifications about your brand, but you can also set it up to monitor your competitors too. This makes it a great tool for staying on top of what is happening in your local area so you can get there first for local link building opportunities.

#20 Local SEO Checklist

Last, but by no means least is a ‘tool’ all local businesses need: a local SEO checklist.

This free checklist includes over 40 items to make sure that your local SEO is set up as best as it can be to maximise your local marketing efforts.

The checklist runs through optimising your website for local search, creating local SEO content, Google My Business checks, online reviews, citations and more to keep your marketing efforts on track and get the most out of your local SEO.

Wrapping up

When it comes to SEO tools to help with local search, there are a lot of options out there. I hope this article demonstrates that you can get a lot of work done with the right tools.

Although it should be said that tools aside, you’ll still need to put in the work to see results from local SEO. You still need to put in the time to optimize your site, fix your citations and get reviews.

Tools can help you do a more effective job of this, but they are still not a replacement to good old fashioned hard work.